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Game Of Thrones Season 2 Premiere A Big Win For HBO

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Game of Thrones season 2 premiere saw a 77% increase over the season 1 premiere one year ago. In television, as in Westeros, the slogan “You win or you die” seems appropriate.

So far, the adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s as-yet unfinished epic fantasy series is winning.

The premiere “unfurled its second season Sunday with 3.9 million total viewers, according to Nielsen,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “HBO estimated that a total of 6.3 million viewers caught one of the three plays the show had over the night.”

Not half bad for a show about dwarves and dragons, the sort of thing once reviled by mainstream audiences. Nerd culture is truly coming into its own, whether or not fantasy is in a bubble.

(spoilers ahead)

The second season starts off pretty strong, too, though the first episode is largely a leaping-off-point for the many sub-plots and main characters the books follow.

Actually, on that note one wonders how Benioff and Weiss (the show’s creators) will handle books four and five (and beyond) in which Martin introduces literally dozens of new point-of-view characters. The books themselves suffer enormously from the introduction of so many narratives and minor characters; I can see how, in a television show, much of this could be handled more deftly.

So far HBO has shown a real knack for introducing us to themes and characterizations not necessarily in the original work (or obviously so) that actually make the show work in ways the books do not. I rarely see this in adaptations, and I’m pleasantly surprised still with the care and intelligence going into the series.

As far as the premiere is concerned, once again Peter Dinklage doesn’t fail to deliver. Tyrion is already a brilliant character, and Dinklage manages to add subtleties to the role that show off his talent as an actor.

Dinklage himself never fails to impress. Alyssa Rosenberg points to this profile of the actor which is really worth a read. Going against the grain of what the movie and television industries would have in a dwarf actor, Dinklage refused to be type-cast:

Dinklage’s sudden stardom offers a pleasurable meritocratic twist to his career, given that the entertainment industry doesn’t typically reward those who turn down roles on principle, much less actors who don’t meet a certain physical ideal. Sure, James Gandolfini struggled before “The Sopranos” made him an unlikely leading man. But James Gandolfini didn’t eat potato chips for dinner every night because he conscientiously objected to playing one of Santa’s elves in Kmart ads…Dinklage stayed in New York and soon was landing stage work and the occasional low-budget film. But he couldn’t book commercial jobs, because he wasn’t interested in the kinds of roles that paid well for dwarves. Specifically, he wouldn’t play elves or leprechauns. Even after Dinklage’s memorable first film role in the 1995 Steve Buscemi indie comedy “Living in Oblivion” — Dinklage played an actor who’s annoyed to be cast in a dream sequence, demanding, “Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?” — he still couldn’t get an agent. “Word got out,” he says. “I started to build up a resentment. And that fueled my desire to live in a cold apartment and be like: ‘I don’t need you! I’m gonna write poetry. Why would I want to be a member of your club if you don’t want me?’”

“Standing up to that kind of commercial and financial pressure must be tremendously difficult, and knowing that he did it makes me admire Dinklage even more than I already do,” writes Rosenberg. I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve not been privy to preview copies of the show, but I’ll try to stay abreast as we move forward through the series. So far I’m impressed. Stannis is as cold and unimaginative as I pictured him, as he blindly confuses honor with literal truths.

“My beloved brother? I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me,” Stannis dictates coldly. “A lie. Take it out.” But when referring to “Jamie Lannister the Kingslayer, call him what he is…Make it Ser Jamie Lannister the Kingslayer. Whatever he is, he’s still a knight.”

The brief interactions between Tyrion and Cersei and Tyrion and Sansa conveyed a great deal in a short space, as did the confrontation between Joffrey and his mother. And yes, I took smug gratification in seeing Cersei slap the little monster, though one can’t help but think “Too little, too late.”

The murder of Robert’s bastards was handled in gritty detail, reminding us again that when king’s fall it is the smallest among us who face the worst retribution. When Robert took the throne, Tywin Lannister murdered the Targaryen children; Robert himself wanted to murder Dany, setting the wheels in motion for Eddard’s eventual fall from grace. Now, with Robert dead more children are killed by his “son.”

Will HBO show us this side of the war of the Seven Kingdoms more? There is some of it in the books – that pain that the weakest in society face when great lords and nobles make war with one another. Women, peasants, and other marginalized citizens face the worst brutality. It may be hard to witness, but I hope this is the direction HBO takes the series. Certainly this critique of power and patriarchy is at the heart of Martin’s work.

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